If I Survive You

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES 'An absolute delight to read' DIANA EVANS 'Superb … A strong, much needed new voice in our literature' PERCIVAL EVERETT 'A compelling hurricane of a book' ANN PATCHETT A major debut that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew. 1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America is far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards his racial ambiguity with suspicion, while their eldest son, Delano, becomes ever more reckless in his longing for a better future. As the brothers battle the many obstacles in their path – an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew – they find themselves increasingly pitted against each other. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart? *LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION* ‘A debut so brilliant it stopped me in my tracks … Astonishing’ I NEWSPAPER 'Utterly unstoppable … a book that you simply do not want to end' IRISH TIMES 'A commanding debut from a talent to watch' OBSERVER 'Sings with authenticity and heart' ANOTHER ‘Astonishingly compact and engaging … Dazzling' JOYCE CAROL OATES A most anticipated Book of 2023 in AnOther Magazine, Huffington Post UK and i Newspaper

‘An astonishing, compassionate entrance to the literary scene' i Newspaper ‘All of life is here in unflinching detail: the fragility of existence, the American dream and the road not taken’ The Booker Prize Judges ‘A commanding debut from a talent to watch’ Observer ‘Brilliantly energetic… his talent feels fully formed and raring to go’ Financial Times ‘Unmissable… rare in that it has the heft and heart of a novel, with the refined finesse of the short story… The only thing to do is eagerly press it into the hands of others’ Irish Times ‘Jaunty, irrepressible and full of energy… A fine achievement’ Suzy Feay, Financial Times Weekend ‘Sings with authenticity and heart’ AnOther ‘Surges with the symphonic, imaginative, propulsive energy of Gabriel García Márquez’ Guardian ‘Ravishing… thrillingly free' New Yorker ‘Fiction written at the highest level… There are no limits to where he will go’ Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House ‘Superb… a beautiful economy in the telling that never sacrifices the depth, complexity and richness of the worlds these characters inhabit’ Percival Everett, author of Erasure 'This I adore… Sumptuous and astute, excellent on the humiliations of familial and societal experience' Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People ‘Tender; vicious; very funny. An impassioned, singular book’ Ross Raisin, author of A Natural ‘An elegant meditation on belonging from a powerful new writer’ Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby ‘A dazzling mirror held up to our identity-obsessed time’ Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde ‘A gifted, sure-footed storyteller’ New York Times ‘Like nothing you've read before’ Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings ‘A welcome reminder of what fiction can do’ Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature and elsewhere. He is a PhD fellow at the University of Southern California and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his first book and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2022.

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